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: Yearly Archives : 2017

NVB Landscape are experiencing prolonged growth in our workload and team, with new projects continuing to come into the office. These include:

Residential Masterplanning

5 Primary Schools

5 Secondary Schools

1 Brewery

1 Public Park

We are therefore recruiting for landscape staff. We welcome applications at any level as we are focused on the right people to join our team:

Graduate Landscape Architects (Recent or P2C)

Landscape Technicians (Focused on CAD)

Chartered Landscape Architect (CMLI)

We are a design focused practice with a small stream of LVIA work. We work across all sectors with a predominance of education projects. We are based in a listed chapel that is a feature of the town of Frome in Somerset. Frome is a great market town within an attractive part of the country. Click this link to the landscape section of the website for a flavour of our work: https://www.nvbarchitects.co.uk/landscape/

Please email applications to Peter Baker at peterbaker@nvblandscape.co.uk with CV and a portfolio that demonstrates as much depth of the landscape design process, i.e. from inception to completion on site as well as a sample of LVIA if applicable. We’re interested to see a good grasp of the process of design at the key stages of concept, planning, tender and construction.

Planning has been granted for the new Day House Village at Dean Close School, Cheltenham. The four day houses will provide a pastoral hub for 240 pupils at the upper school with dedicated senior and junior study spaces as well as social spaces arranged around a new landscaped courtyard. The school hopes to begin construction early 2018.

The new Kingfisher Primary School for Somerset County Council continues on site with the frame and floors installed. The roof is going on and the adjacent sports field was recently seeded to allow it to develop for handover next Easter.

The project is the latest in the education sector to be delivered with BAM Construction and Somerset County Council.

Work is progressing on the new Sports Hall for St. Mary’s School, Calne. The contract to expand the facilities at the school is well underway and the installation of cladding has begun. The building has been carefully designed to work on the site which is tightly constrained by the swimming pool and a listed boundary wall. The scheme also includes additional changing rooms, office space and an extended Dance Studio for the School. Completion is expected in early summer 2018.

NVB have now completed the fifth phase of summer boarding house refurbishments at Epsom College.

The project involved the removal of asbestos, the part conversion of a boarding house to a day house and the refurbishment of an existing day house. The brief is to update the image of the pupils’ residential accommodation at the college and to make the accommodation more homely. The project also involved the over roofing of 600sqm of flat roof and associated external works creating garden areas for the boys and girls associated with the day house. The image below shows part of the existing boarding house that was originally two 2 double study bedrooms and four single study bedrooms.

Director Giles Vallis has distilled our experience of school masterplanning into an article which has been published in the latest issue of ‘The Bursar’s Review’ magazine (Summer 2017). Click the link to read a copy of the article, which is reproduced here with kind permission of the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association. The article outlines the importance of a good masterplan and how we work with our clients to achieve this.

We were delighted to see Abby Cockram, one of our talented architectural technologists, getting married last weekend and would like to wish her and her husband many congratulations and best wishes for a long and happy life together.

Abby studied Architectural Technology and the Environment at Plymouth University and subsequently studied and gained a Masters in the Conservation of Historic Buildings at the University of Bath. She joined NVB as an architectural technologist after beginning her career at an architectural practice in Bristol.

We came across an old marketing brochure this week from 1980 when we were still known as Vallis and Associates and apart from the fantastic Princess Di hair, the thing that struck us was that the client list includes quite a number of organisations which we are still working for. We pride ourselves on building long term relationships and in finishing a job properly once we are committed and we make this point every time we are pitching for new work, but it is nice to have something from the archives to back it up.